James‘ Medical dictionary s.v. Hermaphroditus

Already before the Encyclopédie was published, three of the later editors (Denis Diderot, Marc-Antoine Eidous and François-Vincent Toussaint) had translated James‘ Medical dictionary. The entry on hermaphrodites already contains many elements that would be widely disseminated by the Encyclopédie itself:

HERMAPHRODITUS, ἑρμαφρόδιτος, from Ἑρμῆς, Mercury, and Ἀφροδίτη, Venus. An Hermaphrodite; that is, one who partakes in both Sexes.

As I look uppon all the Histories related of Hermaphrodites to be merely imaginary, I shall only observe, that of many I have seen who have been reported to be so, I have met with none who were any more than mere Women, whose Clitoris was grown to an exoritant size, and whose Laba Pudendorum were preternaturally great.

The Encyclopédie itself

The first edition of the Encyclopédie itself has a very long article on hermaphrodites, or rather a very long article on the anatomy of the (supposed) hermaphrodites and a short one on mythology; both are signed „D.J.“ (= Louis de Jaucourt). The full version is easily accesible online, I only give a few excerpts here:

An English translation (by Naomi J. Andrews) of these passages reads as follows:

Hermaphrodite. A person who has both sexes, or the natural parts of man and woman.

Nevertheless, this prodigal of nature, who united the two sexes in the same being, was not favorably welcomed by all, if we believe the account of Alexander ab Alexandro, who says that the people who bore the sexes of both man and woman, or to use a single word, the hermaphrodites , were regarded by the Athenians and the Romans as monsters, and thrown into the sea at Athens and at Rome into the Tiber.

But are there true hermaphrodites ? One could raise this question in the times of ignorance; one should no longer propose it during the enlightened centuries. If nature wanders sometimes in the production of man, it does not go as far as metamorphoses, confusions of substances, and perfect assemblages of two sexes. That which is given at birth, even, perhaps, at conception, does not change into another; there is no person in whom the two sexes are perfect, that is to say who could reproduce in herself as a woman, and also outside himself as a man, tanquam mas generare ex alio, & tanquam foemina generare in se ipso […for as much as the male to produce out of another and the female to produce in her own self…] in the words of one canonist. Nature never permanently confuses these true signs, nor its true marks; nature ultimately shows the characteristics that distinguish sex; and if from time to time these are hidden in infancy, they are definitively revealed in puberty.

[…]

We conclude, therefore, that hermaphrodism is nothing more than a chimera, and that the examples that one hears of married hermaphrodites , who have both had children, each as man and woman, are childish fables, drawn from the heart of ignorance in the love of marvels, so difficult to dismantle.

It is necessary, nevertheless, to concede that nature plays very strange tricks on natural parts, and that there have appeared a few times subjects of an exterior appearance so bizarre that the inability to distinguish their true nature is, in some way, excusable.

Supplements to the Encyclopédie

The giant project of the Encyclopédie was supplemented by several volumes, including a separate series of plates. The third of these Supplément volumes contained an article on hermaphrodites that was even longer than that of the Encyclopédie. It was written by Albrecht von Haller, Hugues Maret and Jean La Fosse; a long section for which no author is given is in fact lifted from the Dissertation sur les hermaphrodites by George Arnaud de Ronsil (Klöppel 2010, 174; for more details, see https://intersex.hypotheses.org/365).

As for the plates, volume 12 of the Recueil de planches (edited by Panckoucke, not the Encyclopedists themselves) contains three plates on Hermaphrodites (available online: Planche 1, Planche 2, Planche 3; for comment, see McGuire 1991, Imlinger 2012, Stănică 2013). The plates are lifted from de Ronsil’s book, too.

By and large, the article is faithful to the original article by Louis de Jaucourt quoted above, making time and again clear that there were no hermaphrodites and – perhaps even more importantly – that only experts (anatomists) could authoritatively on such cases. Yet there is an interesting oddity resulting from the reuse of de Ronsil’s Mémoire. While the Encyclopédie is rightly famous for its scepticism if not outright denial of the existence of hermaphrodites, de Ronsil in his book had quoted examples of what he thought to be true hermaphrodites, and his plates were meant to illustrate this. Yet in the Supplément, all references to true hermaphrodites are left out, and the new legends to the plates make clear that they only show supposed hermaphrodites (Klöppel 2010, 174; Imlinger 2013, 280). As Stănică argued, the stlye of the first plate – imitating classical Roman art – may also be read as a kind of comment, linking the figure of the hermaphrodite to Roman mythology and hence reducing the irritation the images may have cause (Stănică 2013, 160); but it is also important to note that de Ronsil had arranged the plates very similarly. While in his Mémoires the plates are dispersed over more pages, and the legends are different, the sequence of the plates is the same as later in the Recueuil de plates:

The plates in the Recueuil de planches are lifted from de Ronsil, where they are found in a slightly different arrangement, but already in the same sequence as in the later Recueuil. Screenshot of a pdf version of de Ronsil’s Mémoires, with a total of four empty pages delted. Source: https://books.google.de/books?id=iYNEAAAAcAAJ. Public domain.

Diderot’s own writings

While the Encyclopédie and even more so the supplement volumes insist that there are no „true“ hermaphrodites, it is also worth mentioning Diderot himself in his anatomical studies (published only posthumously) was much more willing to accept their existence than the relevant Encyclopédie articles did. Quoting von Haller, he noted that the combination of male and female genitals in one person was not impossible:

There are only few examples of the combination of the sexual organs [of both sexes] in one individual, but the likelihood of such a combination does not lack a certain probablity.

Éléments, ed. Quintili, 269; own translation.

Likewise in his famous Rêve, Diderot even makes the physician Bordeu develop a theory how women could turn into men that is manifestly inspired by Galen’s De usu partium – for text and comment, see https://intersex.hypotheses.org/3620.